I built the performance around one constant: sixty minutes. Everything else could change. Anticipating, pacing and pushing through were not fixed gestures to perform. They became practical decisions made within each hour: when to slow down, conserve energy, prepare for fatigue, withdraw, continue or push harder. The duration was predetermined; how my body could inhabit it was not.

Recreating the clock at architectural scale changed my relationship to it. Instead of looking at a clock, I had to enter and move through one. Sculptures from Bodies of Time replaced the numerical hour markers, while small handmade cones of sand marked the minutes, recalling the granular measure of time in an hourglass. A bed, mat and objects used for pain management and care brought the conditions of working from home into the same physical field.

Care was part of the action. Stretching, massaging painful muscles, applying heat and resting were not pauses outside the performance; they were some of the ways I could continue through it. The adjoining Crip Time Pocket offered a smaller space for withdrawal and stillness, allowing rest and bodily maintenance to occupy the same hour as effort and work.

Repeating the performance over ten days made change impossible to hide. The task and duration remained the same, but pain, fatigue and energy did not. Some days required a different pace or different choices from others. The repetition also accumulated in the materials: the fabric covered, sand filled clock hands gradually warped and dragged through use, holding physical traces of the labour required to move them.

Jonathon Griggs developed the live sound from the rhythms and mechanisms of different clocks. The sound responded to my movement, exertion and stillness, and I responded in turn to changes in its rhythm, texture and intensity. This created an exchange in which neither my body nor the sound held a completely fixed tempo, even while the hour continued to pass.

The audience gathered around the perimeter of the clock face, outside the field I was moving through. This spatial relationship mattered to me. Actions that are often private, managing pain, pacing effort, resting, deciding whether to continue, became visible and were witnessed over time. Some people stayed for the full hour or returned on different days, and conversations around illness, work, care and time developed through these encounters.

The exhibition also included a response card asking, “What would a clock look like if it measured your kind of time?” Visitors could write, draw, annotate or collage their responses. I wanted the question to turn the work towards their own experiences of energy, interruption, care, endurance and rest, without suggesting that those experiences needed to resemble mine.

Crip Time holds one hour steady while the body, sound, material and encounter continue to change around it. I wanted the work to make visible the effort of negotiating time when bodily capacity cannot remain constant, and to let care, pause, exertion and persistence belong to the hour itself.